Supernaturalism

Supernaturalism, a belief in an otherworldly realm or reality that, in one way or another, is commonly associated with all forms of religion.

Evidence of neither the idea of nature nor the experience of a purely natural realm is found among primitive people, who inhabit a wonderworld charged with the sacred power (or mana), spirits, and deities. Primitive man associates whatever is experienced as uncanny or powerful with the presence of a sacred or numinous power; yet he constantly lives in a profane realm that is made comprehensible by a paradigmatic, mythical sacred realm. In the higher religions a gulf usually is created between the sacred and the profane, or the here and the beyond, and it is only with the appearance of this gulf that a distinction becomes drawn between the natural and the supernatural, a distinction that is not found, for example, in the classical religious traditions of Greece and China. Both the Olympian deities of ancient Greece and the Tao (“Way”) of ancient China were apprehended as lying at the centre of what today is commonly known as the natural; yet they were described in language that was imbued with concepts of the sacred.

Paradoxically, the most radical division between the natural and the supernatural is established by those forms of religion that posit a final or ultimate coincidence between the natural and the supernatural, or the sacred and the profane. This is true both in Indian mystical religion and in Near Eastern and Western eschatological religions, which are concerned with the last time that inaugurates a new sacred age. Buddhism, from its very beginning, established a total distinction between the realm of life and individual (saṃsāra), which it identified interiorly as the arena of pain and suffering, and the goal of the Buddhist way, Nirvāṇa, which is understood in wholly negative terms as a final and total release from saṃsāra. As Buddhism developed in India, however, and did so in part by way of making the distinction between Nirvāṇa and saṃsāra ever more comprehensive and pure, it gradually but decisively reached the point of identifying Nirvāṇa and saṃsāra, and this identification, according to some scholars, became the foundation of Mahāyāna (“Greater Vehicle”) Buddhism.

Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islām, which emphasize eschatology (the doctrine of last times), posit a radical dichotomy between the old aeon and the new aeon, or this world and the Kingdom of God. While normative Judaism cast off eschatology, although it was reborn in a mystical form in the Kabbala (Jewish mysticism), Christianity arose with an eschatological expectation of the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God. Primitive Christianity identified Jesus with the eschatological figure of the Son of man, a divine redeemer whose coming would inaugurate the Last Judgment and the end of the world. This early Christian faith went hand in hand with the belief that all things whatsoever will be transfigured into the Kingdom of God. Such a form of faith refuses to accept the world as simply world or nature but rather understands both nature and history as constantly undergoing a process of transformation that will issue in a wholly new creation or new world.

The secularization of modern Western civilization has created a gulf between the natural and the supernatural because of modern conceptions of the physical universe as being controlled by scientifically knowable and predictable laws and as existing apart from the influence or control of God. Hence, the world becomes a profane reality that is wholly isolated from both the sacred and the supernatural.